NASA uses moon as a Mirror in its hunt for extraterrestrial life

Scientists have found a new trick for the hunt for habitable exoplanets and it involves the help of Moon.

In a recent study, the Hubble Space Telescope was used to identify ozone in Earth’s atmosphere during a lunar eclipse. This was however done indirectly. The astronomers used the Moon as a mirror that reflects the sunlight transmitted through Earth’s atmosphere, which was then captured by Hubble telescope. This was the first time that a total lunar eclipse was captured at ultraviolet wavelengths and from a space telescope.

“Finding ozone is significant because it is a photochemical byproduct of molecular oxygen, which is itself a byproduct of life,” Allison Youngblood, lead researcher of Hubble’s observations, said in a statement. The researchers later studied the amount of ozone in the atmosphere and created a “biosignature.” According to them, identifying the same chemical signatures in distant exoplanets can indicate the presence of alien life.

Having created a successful model using the earth and moon, NASA now can mimic the process for exoplanets. However, this would require larger telescopes to collect the feeble starlight passing through the planets’ atmospheres during a transit.

NASA has a forthcoming observatory called the James Webb Space Telescope that could make similar kinds of measurements in infrared light, with the potential to detect methane and oxygen in exoplanet atmospheres. Webb is currently scheduled to launch in 2021.